Herb Hoefer
Update
January 28, 2007
Family and Friends,
I've finally gotten to an internet cafe after my
travels to Mumbai and Bangalore. We were a delegation
of 2 seminary officials and 2 IELC officials to meet
with the Mumbai congregations and pastors to
understand their situation and opportunities. I am
praying that this effort provides a crucial uptick in
all our efforts in that great metropolis of 13
million.
Mumbai really is to India what America is to the rest
of the world: the place of opportunity. You can
remain in your village/town, and you will have
security and stability in your life. But you will
also basically know what the script of your life - and
your children's lives - will be. Or you can move to a
dynamic city like Mumbai and take your chances. You
will live among great confusion, poverty, and stress,
but you have a chance to greatly change your life.
Certainly you can get your children a much better
education and feel some confidence that they will make
it in Mumbai even if you don't. It always amazes me
how the lower middle class and upwardly mobile poor
have such high aspirations for their children and will
endure all kinds of suffering to make their children's
future bright.
Our IELC has a 13-year partnership with the German
church organization Kindernothile in
serving/rehabilitating the poor of Mumbai: street
children, prostitutes, HIV/AIDS victims, druggies,
eunuchs, etc. The social workers provide meals for
about 1000 street children daily in 17 locations
around the city. It's estimated that there are
200,000 abandoned children on the streets in Mumbai.
And who is there once again where no one else will
go?: the Christians. It's neat that two of their
staff are former street children from their program.
In contrast to all this poverty and oppression are the
traffic-filled freeways, modern malls, huge calling
centers, umpteen banks, and businesses galore around
the city. It's the 4th most expensive city in Asia
for housing. There's no way we can afford to purchase
land for a church building. A couple of creative
ideas were floated: purchase two adjoining
apartments, break down the adjoining walls, put in
soundproofing, and make it into a
parsonage-cum-worship place ($40,000) or purchase a
bus and convert it into a chapel that the pastor
drives the 1-2 hours between his various congregations
($25,000). We don't have these funds, but urban
mission is a priority of the Ablaze movement so we
have hope.
The IELC has ten congregations in Mumbai, working in
four languages, plus English. All the rest of the
IELC congregations are in South India, mostly in
villages and towns. It's really difficult to get
pastors to make the move to faraway Mumbai. However,
the seminary now plans to send four from the next set
of probationers to plant new churches here. It will
be somewhat more expensive because of the huge travel
expenses in getting around the city, of course, but we
hope the Jesus Is Lord mission society can come up
with the extra funds(about $70 a probationer).
The seminary also plans to set up an extension program
of its lay training one-year program. When the IELC
President announced this plan at the end of one of his
presentations, the crowd immediately erupted in joyous
applause. The Indian Christians yearn for strong
biblical and evangelistic training. Once again, we
will need to find the funds for the professors to
travel and stay a week at a time.
The IELC has one excellent piece of property. Pres.
Rajagambeeram really wants to develop the prize
properties of the church. He immediately envisioned a
multi-storied building for an English-medium school
that would also provide parsonages and worship space.
Wealthy people will pay well to get their children
into Christian schools. The school would not only be
an effective mission agency of the church but could
provide profits for all the rest of the Mumbai needs.
If we added apartments at the top, it might be
possible to get a financier to fund it if he got the
top 5 floors. Now Rev. Rajagameeram wants an LCMS
engineer to come and make all this come about. Any
volunteers?
The Rethinking Forum conference in Bangalore went on
well once again. There were 65 in attendance, mostly
young Western missionaries. The effort is to help
them develop an approach that respects and is rooted
in India's culture, not importing Western forms and
ideas as so often in the past. We had testimonials of
caste Hindu converts, Christian sanyassis (wandering
holy men), ashram (retreat center) workers, etc.
leading the program. My two presentations were on
developing new, non-Western terminology and on
biblical principles of enculturation.
One unplanned presentation was by a participant from
New Zealand who had spent 27 years as a yogi. He had
expected to attain spiritual transformation through
this quest. He indeed attained amazing yogic powers,
but he said his character and spirituality didn't
deepen at all. Then he had a vision of Jesus,
committed his life to Him, and found the change of
character and spiritual depth that he had worked so
hard for all those years. He's written a book about
his life, and he's now in India distributing a small
booklet about it as an evangelistic tool.
God bless.
Herb